Politics is not merely a series of policy battles, but an ongoing struggle for the primacy of our favored understandings about both how the world is and how it ought to be. In this way, politics is a contest between diverse meanings that political actors make. Comparing the trajectory of two contemporary social movements—the fight for marriage equality and the struggle for a living wage—Woodly plays out the implications of the idea that a part of what it means for a social movement to be successful is not only that it win discrete policy battles, but, more importantly, that it rewrite the political field in its own favor. Social movements achieve lasting success not primarily through pursuing political changes, but by changing politics itself.
